Latest Google News:
What Google Gains From the Crisis:
Last year's question of whether Google might be invulnerable to a recession has officially been answered. Since the beginning of the year, investors have sliced the company's stock price nearly in half over fears that spending on online ads will slow or fall as the credit crunch freezes wallets.
But there's an upside for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG - news - people ): Even as the search giant suffers, the company's competitors seem to be suffering more. And by the time the economy has recovered, analysts watching the search market say the downturn may have only helped Google tighten its already dominant lead in search marketing, the largest--and still growing--category of the Web ads.
Microsoft And Google Face Off in Washington:
After Google and Yahoo announced an advertising partnership in June, letters from consumer groups and advertising associations poured into U.S. government regulators, urging them to support or block the proposed deal.
Mixed in among the complaints from the usual lobbying suspects were letters from several farming groups, including the National Association of Farmer Elected
Committees and the National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association , arguing that since farmers use the Internet, they were worried about a Google-Yahoo monopoly.
Google and Blackberry Jump on the App Store Bandwagon:
The days when the mobile phone was, well, a phone are over. While this has probably been true for some time, the last two days have reinforced that point as both Google and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, unveiled plans for selling applications that run on their phones.

( The phone that changed everything )
The model is Apple, which distributes games, productivity tools, and other programs that run on the iPhone through its apps store. The apps are developed by independent programmers and big corporations alike; some are free, while authors charge for others. Apple says it doesn’t profit directly from the sale of these programs. Instead, the apps – and there are now thousands of them available — make the iPhone more appealing to prospective buyers. The message: The iPhone is more than a phone, an email device, or even a way to access the Web. It’s a pocket-size computer capable of doing anything a desktop computer can.
more The strategy has worked, if Apple’s announcement Tuesday that iPhone sales jumped more than 500% year-on-year is any indication. So it’s no surprise that rival smartphone makers are jumping on the apps bandwagon. (And yes, we know that Google doesn’t make the phones that run its Android mobile operating system, but you wouldn’t guess that based on how heavily Google is promoting its new G1 phone from T-Mobile.)
RIM on Tuesday announced plans to open its own apps store for programs that will run onthe BlackBerry. The store will launch in March 2009, and developers can start submitting programs in December. Google’s store will launch next week, and it has a sneak preview of the site available now.
One side note will be the extent to which corporate information-technology departments allow workers to download apps for company-issued devices. We imagine that there are some IT departments that will argue that these programs are a security risk, that they’ll ruin productivity, or that the reason employers give workers devices is for email and phones calls – not playing games. But as it becomes clearer that we’re living in the application age, these arguments will become increasingly difficult to defend. Top |